Hi Ben-

Hi Chris,

Let me take this opportunity to extend congrats and
kudos on your Pluto study which wound up on Spaceweather.
Really exciting data. Well done!

Do you have any examples? I think pulling off an amateur image as good
as the Apollo image is something of a long shot.

I'll have to look for the examples, however Chuck Woods
posted an image by Pavel Presnyakov of Kiev yesterday
which took on the Theophilus, Cyrillus, Catherina trio.
It may still be up on his "lunar image of the day"

http://www.lpod.org/

It was a new camera (he said). Don't know what.
The image is dark so there's probably not many frames.
Anyway when I first saw it I would have sworn it was a
BMP. No, it was a JPEG

image looks to be around 175 meters per pixel, with the finest resolved
structures between 2 and 3 pixels. That requires a telescopic resolution
of better than 1/4 arcsecond. That's theoretically possible with a scope
in the 16-20" aperture range, but at that size, you'll rarely have
correlated seeing across the 1.25 arcminute scale of this image, so even
lucky imaging techniques will be difficult.

With point sources you can beat the Raleigh limit
frequently. And yes, you have to be lucky. Observation
and imaging alike are a little like fishing - right place, right
time and all.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to match the resolution of the
Apollo image, only that I think it's at the very edge of what's
possible, and I'm not sure it's been done. You'd certainly need a fairly
large aperture and superb seeing conditions.

Doesn't Pete use a large aperture? It sure looks like it.

The scanned Apollo image is quite small; I wonder what the resolution is
on the original film?

Don't get me wrong - I don't do any imaging. I have
worked in optics though and I think the Apollo image
suffers from prism inducement from having to shoot
through a piece of plexiglass. Pete's image is nearly as
sharp.

Keep up the good work,

Ben
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